Mule Ears

Holy Creeping Featuritis, Batman! My next GPSr will be smaller, lighter and have longer (preferably infinite) battery life. It will never lose signal, not in the deepest canyon, at the bottom of a mineshaft nor under dense forest canopy. Tracklogs of my trips will be perfect, with no breaks or 100-mph phantom sidetrips. Elevation fixes will be so accurate that I'll be able to go back to that lookout tower in New Mexico and tell the nice fire-spotter lady with certainty whether or not she's above 10,000 feet. It'll accept routes of unlimited length and complexity, and take waypoint labels longer than six stinkin' characters. My next GPSr won't have maps, HD color screen, Bluetooth, cappuccino machine, or MP3. It will be tiny, reliable and indestructable. And if I want to have it before my Foretrex 201s wear out, I'd better get cracking, because none of the major manufacturers seem to be working on my next GPSr.

Oh yeah. The gasket was done for. But the cache sat upright in a pile of rocks, so the lid sheltered the contents in spite of the cooked seal.

Elitist? No. For a PMOC cache to be elitist, paid members would have to constitute an elite--a superior class separated from the commoners by a wide gulf of talent, wealth, achievement, etc. Elite status must be coveted and difficult to attain and widely admired or envied, or else it's not elite. Olympic athletes are elite; Navy SEALs are elite; astronauts are elite; movie stars are elite; billionaires are elite. Premium-member cachers are not elite. Virtually all regular members who aspire to premium status could achieve it without difficulty. Any status that can be achieved by a day or two of panhandling, collecting aluminum cans or selling plasma is not elite. If premium members were to be considered elite compared to regular members, then Target shoppers would constitute an elite relative to Wal*Mart shoppers.

You could always use the foam to make a mold and cast a concrete box for the cache:

Here's one that got cooked on one side. The logbook was scorched and some plastic trinkets melted and fused to the can, but it was otherwise OK.

Heh. Only seen one catastrophic failure. GZ was torn up and criss-crossed with heavy tread-tracks. A large bulldozer was parked off to the side. After some searching we found a mangled, smashed-flat ammo can buried in the ground. Other than that, the only other catastrophic failures were inflicted by Muggles with firearms. Even the ones burned in wildfires were pretty much intact.

It might, but it would kind of ruin the effect. I'll admit it: I liked those glass jars and tried to make 'em work because they're purty. Other considerations were secondary. Enclosing the jar in a urethane-rubber boot would probably work to prevent breakage, but...

Course with a 7 degree drop for every 1000 feet, it'd be almost 30 degrees cooler at the top. Full disclosure: It was only 102° F that day, and some of the elevation gain was regain due to my route crossing a couple of drainages. Net elevation gain was about 2800'. The dry lapse rate is actually 5.5° F per thousand feet; wet is 2.7°F. Being a pretty humid day, it was probably 10° cooler at the high point. So it fell short of the thread's 105°, but it's been a mild Summer.

The answer is obvious: You hike 19 miles roundtrip with 3800' of elevation gain to a DNF. 'Cause it just wouldn't be the same at 68 degrees.

Yes. As I mentioned previously, the gaskets, not the glass, turned out to be the primary Achilles heel of the heavy glass jars I used. I originally had six jar-caches. One was destroyed by wildfire and one by a careless finder who dumped a heavy rock onto the cache (instead of using the hollowed log of the original hide); the remaining four developed leaky gaskets. Not sure whether the problem was temperature, UV, or just aging of the soft gasket material (which was obviously intended for indoor use). I anticipated UV and enclosed my jars in simple cloth bags made out of old pants legs, but it didn't prevent gasket-rot. Nope. Ammo cans do very well in our area. For a regular-to-large hide, they are just the ticket. Not that I've seen. If that were a common failure mode, I would think that you'd see more spontaneous destruction of glass litter (e.g., beer bottles), but I don't really have any evidence one way or the other. Yup--see (1) above. My experiment with glass containers was a failure. If I were to try again, I'd do some homework to find a durable, UV-stable gasket material. For certain kinds of hides, like the example I gave of hollow trees/stumps, a 0.5- or 1-liter latch-top jar would be ideal.

Extreme temperatures? You mean like we have in Minnesota? I've never seen a melted lock & lock. I have seen a couple of broken ones... they do get brittle in our sub-zero temperatures. But very few are out caching in that weather. I would assume that UV exposure is rare... are those L&L's placed right in the open, without any UV protection? Environmental considations vary by region. I've seen the issue Mule Ears is talking about and I can easily see the problm with the seal on a glass container. Locally I've seen rodents gnaw some containers and not others. Tins here don't work well. They manage to wick water inside and rush shut at the same time even if not exposed directly to rain. Personally I like my beer in a bottle. I'm sure some others would argue that aluminum is better, but I've exploded more aluminum cans than broken beer bottles. YMMV. Which is what I think this tread comes down too. If you find a perfect use for a glass container like the hamster cache retrieval system. Great. If not use the better container. Here's what I've found via a little research: Lock&Locks are made with polypropylene, whose usable temperature range is -25° to +140° C, with the caveat that below 0° C it must be handled with care to avoid cracking. Main enemy of polypropylene is UV degradation. Polypro items intended for outdoor use can be treated with chemical stabilizers that act like sunscreen, converting the UV to IR. Weather testing of plastics is done by an accelerated-aging process in which the materials are subjected to a lifetime's worth of UV radiation and other conditions (e.g., temperature cycling) in a short period of time. One way to do this is to mount the test sample on a turntable that tracks the sun, so that it receives maximum solar radiation all day long (like tourists adjusting their deck chairs to catch maximal rays). Here's the funny part: One of the preferred places to perform accelerated weathering tests of plastics is the Arizona desert. Our consistently high UV index not only makes us second in the world for incidence of skin cancer (beaten by Australia, dang!), but eats plastics for lunch. (You can click through relative UV stats in map format by month here--AZ is consistently on top, except during our too-brief rainy season.) But, but, those Lock&Lock caches are totally shielded from the sun by unnatural piles of rocks and sticks! Regardless of the irradiated Hell outside, those caches are snug and safe as though they were in dark cupboards as their designers intended, right? Maybe. There's no quality control on the way caches are rehidden. The lucky caches escape sunburn; the rest photodegrade and bust. Though I have not found specific information to support these additional thoughts, there are two other characteristics of AZ desert hides that are hostile to plastic containers: Large diurnal temperature variations, and the tendency of cachers to pile heavy rocks directly on caches. Day/night temperature swings of 40°F are normal here in the dry season; wider swings fairly common. A plastic cache container softens in the heat and stiffens in the cold, all the while supporting a 30-pound rock helpfully piled onto it by the previous finder. Eventually, during the nighttime cold, the embattled and embrittled Lock&Lock loses its struggle and collapses. Finis. So, now I not only know that Lock&Locks aren't particularly good in our climate--having seen many sorry examples in the field--I also have a pretty good idea why these tragedies occur.

The 7.62mm-size ammo can seems to me to be the perfect container size/type for the backcountry caches that I prefer. Because of the shape, people tend to hide 'em in natural crevices rather than under a big-ol' pile of rocks or sticks. And they've got ample space inside for a logbook, trinkets and TBs.

Extreme temperatures? You mean like we have in Minnesota? I've never seen a melted lock & lock. I have seen a couple of broken ones... they do get brittle in our sub-zero temperatures. But very few are out caching in that weather. I would assume that UV exposure is rare... are those L&L's placed right in the open, without any UV protection? Let me rephrase to reflect only those facts that I know for certain: (1) I have seen many Lock-n-Lock containers that became brittle and collapsed. (2) Those Lock-n-Locks were used as Geocache containers in the states of Arizona and New Mexico at elevations ranging from 1800 to 9000+ feet. (3) Those Lock-n-Lock caches had placement dates that indicated ages of a year or less. Their owners may have stored those containers for years in energized tanning beds or on sunlit windowsills prior to placement, but I do not have that information. I cannot with certainty blame the demise of those containers on a particular cause. I have never seen a melted Lock-n-Lock either; the failure mode seemed to be embrittlement followed by collapse. At any rate, something, perhaps confined only to my area of operations, caused these covered plastic tubs to collapse into ruin fairly soon after they were listed as caches. Must be something in the lutefisk.

So is a lock 'n lock. And frankly, I don't get the "cheap" bit. I've never been involved in a hobby that didn't cost something. Hiders should, in my opinion, spend what they need to for a quality container, or don't bother. Lock n locks are terrible containers in the desert. Extremes of temperature and UV exposure rot away the tops in a year or so. The bottoms generally hold out a little longer, so what you end up with is a tub of slime after the rainy season. I have exactly one cache in a Lock-n-Lock; it's sheltered inside a 100-pound concrete box.

C'mon, man, you make it sound like glass is some kind of exotic and dangerous material rather one of the most common types of packaging known to Man. You make it sound like I'm comparing a pile of broken glass to nuclear waste. Glass breaks more readily than metal or plastic and often with more dangerous results. True or false? True, of course. I couldn't resist kidding you about your phrase "potential damage to cacher, and a big pile of dangerous trash." Gee, it's a good thing that we don't make drinking vessels, bowls, bottles and jars out of that wicked stuff--the corpses would be stacking up! I did offer my experience with glass cache containers and conceded that they didn't work out as well as I'd hoped. What I thought was interesting was that it wasn't the glass per se that made 'em unsuitable but rather the gaskets. So that we're clear (a little glass humor there), this is the kind of jar I tried, not some old mayonnaise or pickle jar:

C'mon, man, you make it sound like glass is some kind of exotic and dangerous material rather one of the most common types of packaging known to Man. Until I ran into the gasket-rot problem, I liked latch-top glass jars for placing backcountry/mountaintop caches inside lightning-hollowed stumps. Sounds like a special situation, but it's very common out here. So you have a damp, cylindrical opening where nothing else quite fits--that's a good application for a glass jar (or possibly one of those metal food-storage cannisters, if you're vitrophobic). The heavy glass jars I used were tough and not very likely to break in common usage. The single broken jar was my fault; I placed it on an easy trail where it got lots of visits and probability worked against me. Eventually someone would have to hunt up a huge rock and drop it on the cache.

I had a few hides in glass jars, the kind with a wire-bail latching mechanism and a rubber gasket. The glass was super heavy-duty, so breakage wasn't the primary issue, though one did break when a cacher improved the hide by setting a heavy rock on top. Another was destroyed in a wildfire, hot enough that the glass melted into a blob. But the issue that finally caused me to throw in the towel was that the gaskets would eventually become brittle or rot or just go missing. I don't reflexively reject glass jars as potential cache containers, but I haven't found a jar that's up to the job.

Blisters are not a usual problem with barefoot hiking. My guess is that too much distance, too soon, combined with a beginner's tendency to walk on tiptoe, caused the blisters. Once you get the hang of barefooting and the skin on your feet toughens up a little you'll be practically immune to blisters. If you get blisters frequently, there's another possible cause: minor dehydration/electrolyte loss. Here in the desert the linkage is more obvious than elsewhere, since a couple of hours of hard toil in 100°+ heat will cause noticeable slackness and shrinkage of the skin. Fingers and toes start to look like you've been in the bath too long. This condition greatly increases vulnerability to blisters. This may not be a factor in your case, but I thought I'd bring it up. There's a great book for distance runners and hikers called "Fixing Your Feet." It identifies common foot problems, causes and treatments, and spends a great deal of time on blister prevention. Best thing about the book is that I stopped needing its advice shortly after I started barefooting

No, that won't do it. It's not as though 99 careful, respectful searches will repair the damage done by one careless, trample-the-posies search. Adding wording to the cache description to the effect of 'please don't tear up the landscaping' won't solve the problem either. Many cachers just load coords and go without reading cache pages. The only way to prevent collateral damage is to place the cache a goodly distance away from landscaping features that might be harmed by a thorough, hands-on search.

Hides in the vicinity of gardens and nice landscaping invariably inflict collateral damage due to ham-fisted searches. It only takes one to cause a problem, as in this case. Since you can't control the behavior of your visitors, it's best to place caches well away from anybody's prize petunias.

I adopted this cache a couple of years ago. It's located on top of a 500-foot-high, steep-sided butte in a popular camping area in far-southern Arizona, close to the border town of Nogales. Apparently, there's a climbing guide in the area named Jesus; the numerous muggle logbook entries, mostly in Spanish, often say "made it to the top with the help of Jesus."

"It's like an Easter Egg hunt for hikers, with containers called "caches" tucked away along trails and on mountaintops at specific GPS coordinates. The coordinates are published on a web site, and when you find a cache you post a note and some pictures to the site to tell other players about the adventure you had."

"Angel caches?" Who coined that term, some co-worker of Winston Smith at the Ministry of Truth? Apparently some anonymous 10K+ finding cacher who blew through Ohio recently? First mention of "Angel cache". Ah. Coincidentally, it was some big-numbers folks who placed the most recent of the throwdown, demon caches that I had to remove. They actually mentioned doing so in their log. Pfft.

"Angel caches?" Who coined that term, some co-worker of Winston Smith at the Ministry of Truth?

Second that! Throwdowns cause all kinds of havoc. I adopted an older cache that had spawned several 'replacements.' I removed three (!) and placed a new ammo can. Occasionally, though, cachers report finding the original container that all those helpful cachers were certain was missing.